This is our collection of must-read articles about web performance and ops for the weekend. There’s something about SPDY, Flickr, monitoring, performance tricks, and more.
Every week we bring you a collection of links to places on the web that we find particularly newsworthy, interesting, entertaining, and topical. We try to focus on some particular area or topic each week, but in general we will cover Internet, web development, networking, web performance, webops, security, and other geeky topics.
This week’s suggested reading
Simple SPDY and NPN Negotiation with HAProxy
SPDY is an experimental protocol developed at Google, designed to reduce the latency of web pages. Specifically, its goal is to address the limitations of HTTP 1.1 and to remove existing bottlenecks: head of line blocking, inefficient use of underlying TCP connections, and header bloat amongst others. However, while all of this sounds great in writing, deploying a new protocol on the web, in practice, is fraught with difficulty.
Big Data Problems in Monitoring at eBay
This is a Big Data talk with Monitoring as the context. The problem domain includes operational management (performance, errors, anomaly detection), triaging (Root Cause Analysis), and business monitoring (customer behavior, click stream analytics). Customers of Monitoring include dev, Ops, infosec, management, research, and the business team. How much data? In 2009 it was tens of terabytes per day, now more than 500 TB/day. Drivers of this volume are business growth, SOA (many small pieces log more data), business insights, and Ops automation.
A number of presentations by Flickr at the SF Web Performance meetup.
When I unveiled a new version of this site last year, I hoped the design would slowly evolve. An update in February improved the responsive layout and saw some initial performance optimisations. The last few weeks have seen further iteration. Although the design looks remarkably similar, much has changed below the surface. Where each page previously requested at least 14 assets weighing a total of 385kB, now only 9 requests are needed, and with an unprimed cache, these total just over 100kB. I thought it would be interesting to detail the changes I’ve made, and this time, I’ve got graphs!
50 performance tricks to make your HTML5 apps and sites faster
Creating high performance web apps is crucial for every web developer. Learn directly from the Internet Explorer Performance team about what actually drives performance across the web and how you can make your sites faster. This is the same team that brought you GPU accelerated graphics and compiled JavaScript, and they will share their favorite 50 best practices for web developers.
Bringing JavaScript Code Analysis to The Next Level
A presentation by Ariya Hidayat.
Etsy’s October 2012 Site Performance Report
It’s been about four months since our last performance report, and we wanted to provide an update on where things stand as we go into the holiday season and our busiest time of the year. Overall the news is very good!
Only 1 out of 5 top ecommerce sites uses RUM. Why?
When I talk to people who run big sites, RUM is barely on their radar. (More on that later.) I was talking about this with a colleague last week, and she was surprised my estimate was so low. So I decided to back up my talk with a little ad hoc research.
Disqus: Scaling the World’s Largest Django Application
Disqus, one of the largest Django applications in the world, will explain how they deal with scaling complexities in a small startup.
In this single case study, we see that HTTPS pages are full of missed optimizations. All the rules I listed in the beginning of the post are pretty basic, but nobody knows to look for them. I highly recommend examining your website’s SSL packet traces to look for these common mistakes.
Speed is essential for a great web experience
A presentation by Andy Davies.
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Image (top) via Shutterstock.